Philip Blundell writes:
> Exactly why does kcardd do this, out of interest?
So that it can access the expansion card ROMs using their loaders to get
things like Ether addresses out of them, and shut the cards down properly
when rebooting (so that RISC OS and Linux can re-detect them).
Unfortunately, Acorn did not think about 32-bit modes when they designed
RISC OS, so there are a lot of cards out there that will not access their
cards when they're mapped into 0xe0000000. I used to fix up the problematic
loaders (by re-writing them), but since I receive mails about Linux not
booting and people not appearing to know about the FAQ, I've decided to
go for the option that will allow 99% to work ok, rather than 30% and
the other 60% requiring either blacklisting or replacement loaders to
be written.
With kcardd, it should be able to handle 99% of loaders (since the loaders
/are/ supposed to be OS non-specific), I think that the only ones that
won't work are those which are badly written to use RISC OS SWIs.
(Interestingly, I believe that RiscBSD have to write a new loader for
each and every card that they support).
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